A Ruling Passion

by Judith Michael

  The traffic had thinned and she speeded up. The farther out she drove, the more open the landscape became; now and then she caught a glimpse of sunlit water, a boat pulling a water skier, a stretch of beach. Nobody at the station was on her side. She'd been working with them for over two years, but not one of them came to her defense. It had nothing to do with friendship—she'd never cared about friendship—it had to do with professional respect and standing together when one of them was under attack. They were that way with each other, but not with her. They're all against me, she thought. No one wants me to succeed. They're jealous and hostile.

  She reached Amagansett and drove slowly, looking for the address die rental agent had given her. They kicked her off her own show. And left her with nothing. Except a husband who danced as if he planned to live for another seventy-eight years, and a job as a television producer. There has to be more. More, more, more. Pll think of something; thafs why I came up here, to be alone and to think about what Fll do next.

  Her maid and houseman had gone ahead, and the house overlooking the ocean was ready when she arrived. She was there at the height of the social frenzy that grips the Hamptons every summer. There were lunches every day and three or four parties a night with people who invited her because she was Quentin's wife and the host of her own television show and no one yet knew that the show had been taken from her. There was no one to bother her in the cool privacy of her bed, and there were riding lessons and hours spent at perfecting her skeet shooting. "What I really want to do is hunt," she told her instructor. "Fm going to do that this fall."

  "Anybody in particular you're aiming for?" he laughed.

  "I don't know yet."

  "Hey, that was a joke. You know, a joke.> You were thinking of foxes, right? Dutchess County, right?"

  "Of course," she said and went back to shooting the clay targets that were ejected like missiles in a high arc over the Sound. She seldom missed.

  By September she was at the station again, producing "World Watch" and two other programs. "My cool, collected colleague who's clever enough to conquer her crabbiness," Enderby said, pleased with himself for leaving her alone all summer to get over her pouting. As far as anyone could tell, nothing had changed. As she had always been, Sybille was aloof, efficient and clever, intimate with no one, one of the best producers in New York.

  She never produced "Financial Watch" again.

  In October, Enderby bought Durham's cable network, and Sybille went with him to Washington to sign the final papers. It was the first time she had been away from New York since Walt Goddard began hosting her show and her humiliation began. It had been impossible to keep it a secret—how could anything played out on television be kept a secret?—and rumors were everywhere that the problem was her, not the show; that she'd been dumped because of abysmal ratings. Everyone asked her about it, usually with a small lift of the eyebrow or pretended sympathy, and it got so she didn't want go to anywhere. She didn't even have a social life anymore.

  In Washington there were no rumors. She told anyone who asked that she had left the show because she and her husband had so much to do to build up their new cable network. She said it so often she began to believe it. After two days, Washington seemed to her a far more civilized city than New York, its people more intelligent, its atmosphere more interesting, its society more desirable. After a week, the knot of ftiry and shame inside her had shrunk almost to nothing. She felt free.

  "Why don't we move here?" she asked Enderby. They were leaving the lawyer's office late in the afternoon after signing the last of the documents that made the sale complete.

  "Move where?" he asked vaguely. He was tired and his back ached; he felt old.

  "Here. Washington." She helped him with his coat. "Wouldn't you like that?"

  "No. Where the hell's the limousine? It's supposed to be waiting."

  "He'll be here; we said five o'clock and it's almost that. Are you tired?"

  "Don't treat me like an invalid. He doesn't have to wait till the dot of five; he should be here early."

  '*We won't use him again. If we move here we'll have our own driver."

  "Who said anything about moving here?"

  "I want you to think about it. I'm tired of New York, and you know you've been saying it's too noisy and hard to get around. I think we need a change. There's not a lot more we can do with the station, you know; we should be doing something new. Isn't that why you bought the network? Why not move here and concentrate on it? We could look at apartments while we're here; shall we?"

  He was scowling. "Are you out of your mind?"

  "I don't think so. I think it's a very good idea."

  "I never said New York was noisy."

  'Tou said you'd like someplace quieter."

  "I'm damned if I did. The grave is quiet; I don't need quiet until then."

  "It isn't a question of quiet. I'm tired of New York. I'd like something different. Quentin, I want to live here. We don't have to stay if we don't like it, but I want to try it for awhile. A year. Let's try it for a year."

  He shook his head. "I can't think about it now. That lawyer ran me ragged, and I'm tired."

  'Tou'll rest at the hotel; we'll talk about it at dinner." The limousine pulled up to the curb and she slid in first. "It's just the two of us tonight, so we'll have a chance to talk." She tucked the lap robe, around him. "Think about it, Quentin. It's what I want."

  He gave her a sharp look. "You want out of New York, is that it?"

  Starded, she looked away from him. He kept surprising her with his sudden swings from a vague fog to the shrewdness that had made him a millionaire. She started to deny it, then stopped. It was his fault she wanted to leave New York; let him know it. "C5f course I do. For now, an^wav. It's damned hard, facing everyone. They know you forced me out." '

  He grunted and fell silent. And there's something else he'll never know, Sybille thought. We're going to leave New York because he likes it there, because he's comfortable with familiar places and people, because he doesn't like change. We're going to leave New York because he's going to pay for what he did to me. They drove smoothly, in silence, along the broad streets to the Willard, where a doorman sprang forward to open the limousine door. "I'll give it some thought," Enderby said. "There's no rush."

  "Yes there is," she insisted. "I don't want to live in New York anymore. I'm serious about this."

  He peered at her as they walked into the lobby. 'Tou never cared before what people think."

  "I always cared," she said coldly. "I just don't whine about it. Quentin, I want a year, to see how we like it; if we don't, we'll go back. We won't sell the apartment; we'll always have a place to go back to."

  He was silent, brooding as they walked past the Peacock Alley promenade to the elevators.

  "This isn't a whim," Sybille said, her voice hard.

  'Well." He shrugged and let his breath out in a long sigh. "It might not be a bad idea. I don't know what the hell I'm doing with this network; all it's got so far is a couple cooking shows, some news, and sports— Well, we might do it. We'll talk about it at dinner. Did you make reservations?"

  "Yes."

  "Good. You're good, Syb." In the elevator, he put his arm around her and pulled her against him. "You warm a man's heart and hearth and happy home. Stubborn, though; a pain in the ass sometimes. But exciting—when you don't wear me out. I suppose you've already picked out a place to live."

  "No, but I can. if you give me an hour."

  "I'm going to take a nap. That's your hour." He straightened his sore back and grinned. "Some peopie'd say I'm too old to start again. They'd be wrong, wouldn't they, babe?"

  "Of course they would." They walked to their suite, her hand beneath his elbow. Let him think what he wanted. She knew better. The truth was, he was at the end of his life. She was just beginning.

  Chapter 12

  r/1

  ■ M / he had closed the drapes when diey went into her

  V_^R^ bedroo
m, and when Nick woke, with a start, he

  ^ K thought it was night and he had slept through din-

  ^^^^ r^^J"- "God damn it," he said furiously and threw off

  the sheet and flung himself out of the bed.

  "Nick! Where are you going?" She reached for him, her arm a pale

  ribbon in the darkness. "What is it.>"

  He was at the window, throwing open the drapes. Sunlight poured into the room. "My God, it's still early."

  "Of course it's early. You said you had to leave at five. I wouldn't let you oversleep. Are you angry at me.>"

  "No, of course not." He looked at his watch. Four-thirty. He had time to stop at the office on the way home. He walked to the trail of his clothes on the floor and bent to pick them up.

  "Nick!" She slid out of bed and put her arms around him, pressing her body against his. "You promised we'd have the whole afternoon. Come back to bed; we have lots of time."

  His arms came up to move her away from him but instead tightened around her. She was warm and extraordinarily soft, her skin as rosy

  and dimpled as a baby's, her blond hair tousled from die time they had already spent together, her body yielding before he made any demands on it. She pulled back her head, looking at him with a httle smile and pulling at his hand so that he moved with her to the soft carpet. Roughly he pressed her backward, and lay with her, his hand between her legs.

  "So nice," she whispered against his lips. "Nice, nice..." Her sharp nails left little indentations in his skin, the sun beat upon them, her murmuring voice filled his head. She opened her legs wide and rose to meet him as Nick raised himself above her. Then he pushed into her, pounding into her, feeling her movements match his, hearing her small cries, until there was only her pliancy and her softness and the white sun on his back.

  But later, as he drove home, he was disgusted with himself. Because he could not remember her name.

  There had been months when he had always slept alone: when he was working crazy hours and spending all his free time with Chad. But when there were fewer crises, and new routines established, and free time, he found as many women as he wanted, and there had been a lot of them after Pari: women for an afternoon or an evening or, rarely, a few weeks or months; women who were looking, as he was, for a place to settle, a Ufe to build. He never took them to his home, and most of them Chad never knew about. Once or twice, with someone he had hopes for, he brought Chad and the three of them went to dinner, but nothing ever came of those. Nothing came of any of them. No one he met brought the magic of Valerie, and he would never again let himself conftise pity with love, as he had with Sybille.

  Christie, he thought as he turned into his driveway and pressed the remote control that opened his garage door. That was her name; of course he hadn't forgotten it. Christie Littell, a nurse, a lovely woman, the most pliant he'd ever met. Not a woman with whom he wanted to spend his life.

  Chad was waiting for him, as he was every night, listening for the sound of the garage door, then dashing to the front steps, scrunching down on his haunches, and looking bored. "I was waiting for hours," he said.

  Nick laughed and swung him to his shoulder. "I ran into a small dragon at the corner."

  "Wrong." Chad shook his head. "Dragons are enormous."

  "This one was small and powerfiil; he's been doing a lot of bench presses to develop his muscles."

  Chad giggled. "What does he do with them? Kill bad people?"

  "No, he doesn't believe in taking the law into his own hands. His biggest muscle is his tongue—he's been eating broccoli and asparagus for years to get it strong—and he licks up bad people and takes them to jail."

  "He does not!"

  "Oh no? He licked up my car. Thought I was a robber and swung me up on his slithery tongue. Then he saw I was really a pretty nice guy with a terrific son waiting for me, so he let me down. But the car got a good washing; if you don't believe me you can see for yourself."

  Giggling, Chad ran off to check the car Nick had had washed that day, and, with relief, Nick went to the kitchen. His coming-home game with Chad was getting out of hand; each night the story was supposed to be different and he was having trouble thinking up plots. Computers are easier, he thought; I'd hate to have to think up stories to make a living.

  He pushed open the kitchen door and smiled at Elena. She had married two months earlier, and she and her husband Manuel had taken a month-long honeymoon Nick had given them in Mexico, to visit their families, while Elena's sister took care of Chad. Now Elena and Manuel lived in the apartment over the garage of Nick's new home in Portola Valley. He had bought it in January, while they were in Mexico—the same time Sybille had called to tell him she and Enderby were moving to Washington and she'd be too busy for awhile to come to California—and Chad had run through the twelve rooms, yelling that he was lost, that he'd never see his dad again, and that Elena would never find them when she got there. Then he got busy decorating his room, drawing on the walls Nick had had prepared with a special surface, choosing drapes and matching sheets and bedspread, and strewing his toys around the room. "They'll be lonesome in a strange house if they can't see me," he said solemnly, and Nick, with a laugh, dropped all talk of Chad's organizing his toys and games and stuffed animals on his new shelves or in his new toy chest at the foot of his new bunk bed.

  The house was spacious and cool, skillfully decorated by a young woman who was living with Ted in another spacious house just a block away. Often, when the two men were working at night in Nick's study, after Chad had gone to sleep, they would look around and grin at each other, remembering a family room and garage in San Jose.

  In the three years since they had celebrated their move into that garage, they had expanded to fill six buildings with eight hundred

  employees. They were shipping a thousand computers a week; their sales were close to a hundred miUion dollars a year; and the two of them had been interviewed for stories in California newspapers and magazines. With Nick's brilliance in software, which now included word processing, accounting, payroll and games, and Ted's genius for hardware—including printers, modems for hooking computers to telephones, monitors, disk memory and internal memory—Omega Computer had never lost its lead even though new competitors cropped up all the time.

  By now Nick was no longer involved in the day-to-day operations of Omega. He had resigned himself to leaving that to a general manager and department heads while he concentrated on what he called, wryly, presidential things: being a leader and conciliator within his company, and marketing it to the rest of the world. At the same time, he was leading the technical development of the Omega 2000, which would be as revolutionary in its own way as the 1000 had been three years earUer.

  He and Ted had decided to launch the 2000 this year, at the time they made Omega Computers a public company.

  All through the previous fall and winter, Nick had been meeting with lawyers and underwriters, preparing for the Omega stock issue. He had taken brief trips around the country and to Europe, coming back to be with Chad before flying off again, and again and again, for six months. He traveled with the underwriters who were his coaches, advisers and, he said wryly, chaperones because they kept him too busy for anything else. In each city he spoke to major investment houses, pension-fund managers and other institutions, to get them interested in Omega Computer and to convince them to make commitments to buy large chunks of Omega stock when it came on the market in the spring. Because he was president of the company, he was the one who had to go.

  At first he was stiff and self-conscious; he called himself a performer in a dog and pony show. He was reluctant to talk about himself, and he disliked the formaUty of overhead projectors and easels with full-color charts and graphs, and photocopies of company history and financial reports.

  But all of a sudden, about the time he faced his fifth audience, he found himself having a good time, and being good at it. He liked talking about the company; he and Ted had nurtured it until it
was almost like their child. For years he had talked about Chad at dinner

  parties with friends—showing his latest pictures and describing his exploits and vocabulary, his good temper and fantastic mind—and wondering, when he got home, how bored his friends had been, even the married, sympathetic ones. But he could talk about Omega without worrying: his audiences had come to listen. They wanted him to talk about himself too, and that was all right, as long as he talked about himself only as the president of Omega, and as long as he could be honest.

  One morning, when he thought his standard pitch was getting stale, he rewrote part of his speech without telling the underwriters, and when he met with a group of investment executives for a breakfast meeting he included the story of the crisis at Omega over the fifteen hundred computers. It was a tricky moment: the underwriters turned pale, and the executives looked starded, but Nick turned it around.

  "When the president reaches so far he stumbles and nearly cracks his skull," he said, "either he's mortally wounded and gets shoved aside or he figures out what he's done, which was to rob his top people of the chance to do what they do best and what they love to do. We've got a bunch of brilliant engineers at Omega, talented and eccentric and fiercely independent. They're on the cutting edge of this whole crazy industry we're inventing as we go along, and they'll work together like kids in a sandbox if you give them the sandbox and then leave them alone. But they won't give you the time of day if you make their decisions and do even a part of the job you told them was theirs. That's what I learned. Omega is the top company in Silicon Valley because if s made up of creative engineers who don't want anybody else to do their work. These days I have a job to do there and it's the only one I do, and if I forget it, there are a lot of people to remind me.

  The laughter was warm and genuine, and that anecdote became part of Nick's standard speech. It was quoted in newspaper articles on him, in March, in The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times^ and in cover stories in Time and Newsweek when Omega Computer was offered to the pubhc, and one billion dollars' worth of stock was snapped up in the first few weeks.